Publisher: $2.5k for Academics to Post Their Own Manuscript to Their Own Repos
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One solution: as a condition of receiving a government grant, any derived work must be published as open access, zero embargo. The only reasonable reason for the embargo was to give legacy publishers time to adjust their business models. That time has past. We don't need buggy whip manufacturers, and we don't need legacy academic publishers. Good riddance.
I welcome the good publishers who have arrived at the future. We need to help get that future evenly distributed.
On to of that, they get government funding, they get funding from the universities, they get funding from private industries, and they have all those people work for them for free too.
(posted in another comment) I don't get why we just don't publish to OpenReview or improve OR and publish to that thing.
I know that trait #1 is on shaky ground these days, and trait #2 is something most people don't even publicly acknowledge is valuable. But they're both things that, if we discarded the current model of journals, we'd be doomed to reinvent (and therefore to produce new middle-men out of.) If we're to have a proper replacement for journal publishers, it would have to perform these functions, while not being so parasitic about it. (As just one idea, maybe journals could be run as nonprofit or industry-membership-funded bodies, rather than as corporations.)
Some authors publish manuscripts somewhere(e.g. PubMed in my previous area), which might be slightly different from the final version (editing, and/or formatting).
If there's a law to support real Open Access, may be they should require the paper to be posted on the grants.gov, or somewhere equivalent.
> Researchers sign funding contracts with the research councils long before they sign copyright transfer agreements with publishers. Funders have a right to dictate terms, such as mandated open access, precisely because they are upstream ...
Sounds like the obvious "best spot" to fix the problem has been obvious for quite a long time now. Perhaps we're overdue for some investigations into how the publishers have managed to subvert the funding agencies?
I just can't for the life of me figure out how journals improve the system. The only thing I see is they help reach, but these days that's more handled by the researchers themselves and the universities. The universities are just paying _and_ subsidizing these journals (as well as government). They directly pay for access, they donate, they pay in that their workers also work for these journals (without pay), and so on. What do journals __do__?
My solution is to build new centres of research without bureaucrats.
I think they accomplish the second half but have routinely established that they are incapable of doing the first half.
1) I don't think you can honestly validate or invalidate most research, though there is a bias towards being able to invalidate. I mean in science you tend to not prove things, but disprove things. People forget that the distinctions between things aren't "True vs False" but there's a third option "Indeterminate". Whether you want to point to Godel, Turing, or Schrödinger or whoever. This binarization actually harms science.
2) Metrics for metric's sake is highly destructive to our society and science. Goodhart's Law has clearly been taken to the extreme in our modern society. It's the exact reason everyone hates bureaucrats. Because there is a lack of nuance. The world has gotten more complex, removing nuance from our conversations is going in the opposite direction. Increased complexity can't result in increased hand waving. You just make more errors, at a rate proportional to the increasing complexity.
Back when I was doing research I had a couple of "papers" that I think had interesting ideas but I just hated the submit/publish dance (part of why I left academia after I years). So I just uploaded the "unedited" PDFs into Arxiv, thinking that maybe someone would find them useful.
Fast forward 10 years, I was surprised one of those PDFs was cited by more than 10 published articles. I'm happy I had my cake and ate it too: I could help someone with my ideas and didn't need to do all the bureaucracy.
As I think Churchill said: " everyone wants to be famous, but nobody wants to be useful" (sorry I I completely botched the quote) .
People nowadays care so much for their image .
This would hit Nature where it hurts: right now they control a premier venue for publication of papers that advance the author’s career. If they don’t shape up, that would go away.
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?